WASHINGTON — Kelly Johnson does not remember the exact date, but sometime in early August, nearly two months into his second tenure with the Mets, he approached the team’s hitting coach, Kevin Long, and his assistant, Pat Roessler, with an idea that he hoped would make him a more consistent power hitter in his 11th season in the majors.

Johnson, who is 32 and has nearly 1,400 major league games on his résumé, wanted to try something new with his batting stance and his approach at the plate. Daniel Murphy, a former Met and current Washington National, had transformed himself midcareer into a slugging machine, and Johnson, who was Murphy’s teammate a year ago and who bats left-handed, like Murphy, wanted to apply the same principles.

“It wasn’t, ‘Oh, if he can do it, then I can do it,’” Johnson said. “Murph is his own person, and so am I. It was taking in something and trying to understand what it was that really clicked for him.”

So after watching video of Murphy and working with Long and Roessler, Johnson made small changes to his hitting that have yielded positive results. He stands closer to the plate. He has tightened his swing by bringing his hands in toward his body. He is more willing to try to hit as many pitches as possible to right field.

“I told Pat that if anybody could kind of do what Murph did, it was Kelly,” said Long, whose suggestions sparked Murphy’s power surge in last year’s postseason.

In Johnson’s first 36 games after the Mets traded for him for a second year in a row, he hit .289 with three home runs in 84 plate appearances. In 98 plate appearances over the next 34 games, Johnson hit .256 with six home runs. There is not a drastic difference in those numbers, but Johnson has turned more fly balls into home runs and is enjoying the highest home run rate of his career, albeit in a small sample size.

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Daniel Murphy is having a standout season for the Nationals.CreditGreg Fiume/Getty Images

“It’s put me in a better position to get pitches that I can drive,” Johnson said of his new stance. “I still work on it. I’m still grinding on it and trying to be as good as we can with it and make adjustments still. But I’m excited to see some of the balls go out of the yard and have the extra-base hits.”

Johnson’s versatility and veteran presence have lifted the Mets for two seasons in a row. He has played every infield position and left field this season after being reacquired by the team in a June 8 trade with Atlanta.

He has also been a sounding board for young players. And his production off the bench has been critical for a Mets club that has endured repeated injuries. Entering Tuesday’s games, among major league pinch-hitters with at least 40 plate appearances this season, Johnson was tied for first with four home runs and was second in on-base-plus-slugging percentage with an .862 figure. He struck out in a pinch-hitting appearance Tuesday.

“He’s been huge,” Manager Terry Collins said recently. “When we got him, he brought the same thing he brought last year, and that’s a guy who can come off our bench and put him in the field or at the plate, and he can get the job done.”

Like any major league hitter, especially one who has lasted more than a decade, Johnson has constantly tweaked his swing and his hitting approach. In 2010, the best year of his career, Johnson made a major change and hit 26 home runs with an .865 O.P.S. with the Arizona Diamondbacks. He could not repeat the approach the next season, so he had to evolve.

“This year, I started with the same approach I had last year,” Johnson said of his 2015 campaign, when he hit 14 home runs with the Braves and the Mets in 310 at-bats. “My best home run rate of my career per at-bat was last year.”

And yet, he noted, his current approach at the plate is almost the “polar opposite” of his batting strategy when the season began.

Earlier in his baseball career, Johnson was constantly told to consider standing over the plate with a major emphasis on pulling the ball. He declined to do so because he did not think it was wise to hit an outside pitch to right field. With those pitches, Johnson wanted to hit line drives or hard ground balls up the middle or toward left field.

But now, Johnson felt better prepared to understand and apply the approach preached by Long to Murphy, which led to Murphy’s herculean October performance with the Mets and a 2016 season with the Nationals that has made him a candidate for the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award.

“Now, I’m trying to do it the right way,” Johnson said. “Trying to hit the ball inside tighter and a little better. Less hook, and more straight and backspin. You’re going to feel weird some days, good, bad, but I think it’s a good thing right now. I’ll continue to work on it and keep hoping for these results.”

Or in the words used so often by Murphy, Long said Johnson was “trying to take his A swing now instead of guiding pitches to left or guiding pitches to center.”

Case in point: Johnson’s run-scoring double in the eighth inning of Friday’s 6-4 comeback win over the Braves was a pitch on the outer edge of the strike zone that he drilled to right field. A younger Johnson would have poked the ball, perhaps softly, to left.

Johnson’s improved plate discipline, which he said was a byproduct of this new approach, has also helped. He also has plenty of resources. While leaning on Long, Johnson has also exchanged text messages with Murphy, the model behind the changes.